Beta Patch 10 Video Journal #1

Posted By: January 25, 2012

I managed to get some time alone with Patch 10 today and play through it once. I’ve put together this video on some of the changes detailed in our official patch notes. You can see the new tooltips, belt, skill selection, attributes and more.

Some of the new features are undoubtedly an improvement others are poorly conceived (forced simplified tool tips and skill cool down in town) and I hope to see those changed before release or just after when more people have had a chance to play.

In case you’ve been busy spring cleaning your sock drawer over the last day or so you may have missed other Patch 10 goodies:

Lmfao, I love how any time a girl talks on the internet no one ever comments on what she’s saying. “Really soothing”, “like listening to your voice”, etc.. Totally reminds me of that South Park episode where they all fight over Bebe when she starts growing boobs.

I didn’t mind the Nephalem Stone for changing skills, but I hated not being able to see the other skills in the field. I guess the current iteration takes something good for both worlds. There’s a consequence for changing skills mid-fight that you don’t want. Even changing it out of combat can require you to wait a whole BORING 30 seconds. So, yeah, improve it by removing that cooldown if you change it in town and everything is great. One thing that really affected me is the current economy. Gold felt much more valuable and desirable. I don’t remember if the artisans had a gold component for upgrading before or if that was as costly as it is now. Anyways, in my first playthrough I found myself emptying my pockets of everything to upgrade the artisan and craft my wanted items. I picked up nearly every white item to sell, never missing a pile of gold and made more frequent, but not too many, trips to the town to sell and salvage stuff. All in all, the early economy feels better. I’d be interested in finding out how that develops throughout the game. =)

What you are saying is actually the opposite of what it is. Having white items used solely for salvaging was death for the economy. Simply taking into account how many thousands of white items you´d see drop for you alone by the time you reach inferno for the first time (and how much time you´d spend clicking on them to salvage them) and then allowing all of those white items to be salvagable would result in ridiculous inflation. Even by mid act 1 normal difficulty, white items have so high of a chance to drop, they are almost guaranteed to do so, basically even if nothing else drops, whites will. Now imagine all those items being salvaged and all that gold used to updrade artisans. Everyone would have fully upgraded artisans by the time they first hit inferno and people would be making so much of the end game crafted items that they would lose any value. And crafting items and, to a lesser degree, upgrading your artisans are both meant as two major money sinks for the economy. Which would make the overall economy suffer, which might cause new “currencies” to develope, like in D2. That is also why they are reworking rune system, to make Rlvl 7 runes extra rare so that even few months after D3´s release, only a handfull of people have them (which would also make them rare enough that those who do have them wouldn´t be interested in selling them on RMAH, or if they do decide to sell them, they would command very high price, ideally, of course).

I don’t get what you are saying here. I’m not talking about salvaging. I don’t need salvaging of white items. Removing that from the equation means less early game crafting mats. The whites are there for fluff really. I’m pretty sure that by the time you’re in act 2, you won’t bother picking them up anymore, simply because they aren’t worth picking up. The time spent picking them up and going to town selling them means loosing out on more valuable stuff within the time frame.

Within the scope of the beta, it’s worth picking up the whites, because every little bit counts and you will be spending that money on your artisan. With one play through I only managed to gain him one level, picking up nearly everything I found. Of course, I don’t think that situation will hold up throughout the game. As I said, it will be interesting to see how the economy forms throughout the game and the difficulties. With auction houses available, they’ve ensured that no other currency really becomes viable. Unless the auction houses fail entirely. Sure, we’ll have insanely huge piles of gold as far as numbers are concerned, but why does that matter? Having 1000 gold is the same as having 100000 silver, or 10000000 copper, looking at many other games with an in game currency.

Also, no one knows how expensive maxing out artisans will be. So making any sort of guesses concerning when you’ll have them maxed out doesn’t really make sense. Nor does it make sense to assume that everyone will have shitloads of the top artisan gear or make assumptions about end-game economy when you know absolutely nothing about how expensive these items will be.

Anyways, what I was talking about was the scope of one play through of the beta. Which is the only realistic approach we have right now. The content is tailored for levels 1 through 10. You can reach 13 with a couple more runs, but that takes you beyond what the content and the economy is tailored for at that point. As far as the beta goes, every penny is valuable because you can spend it all on something worth while. That’s good economy.

Am I the only one who finds the skill selection pop-out panel to be hideously ugly? Not the 6 slot panel but the panel where you choose from all the skills. Something about the dark gray rectangular category boxes against the lighter tan parchment color really grates on me. The rest of the UI is beautiful and this is a big eyesore.